HOW TO get All in Wonder 9000 TV tuner working in RH 9
 

First thing I would like to know is if indeed there is support for the tuner under Linux.

I know what you're goint to say next: GATOS?

But folks, if you're not part of the developers group on GATOS then you're f#*@ed.

The project lacks of any understandable documentation that can be useful to any regular user.

Somewhere around here I read that u don't need GATOS just to watch TV. Is that true? Does any one can share a success story on that matter?

They claimed that it could be done with the bttv driver.

bttv is linux driver for TV cards based on the bt848 and bt878 chips.

Question arises is the AIW 9000 based on such chipsets?

And don't get me wrong I have tried to get GATOS working, I've done a lot of research but still just where I started.

First thing I did was to "install" what they claim are their binary drivers. From what I understood a set of files that u have to include on your X11 library, and of course nothing happened.

Next they say if u want to be able to get capture from the card u have to compile a module they call drm kernel, which is not compatible for some reason with the built in kernel in RH9, but no problem u just have to download n compile the kernel of preferance and drm compiles with no problem.

Then it generates a module, called radeon.o which u copy on your /lib/modules to bring it up on boot, so far so good.

Then u boot and if you're lucky u will see radeon.o on your lsmod but if you startx, SURPRISE! Direct Rendering has been disabled u can do glxgears and u will get around 300 fps, and guess what NO TV either!!!

funny don't you think?

I don't know if it'll work, but Mandrake have an RPM of the Gatos drivers. Different kernel, probably won't, but it's worth knowing.

Hhhmmm
 

Well I suppose that could be a good option, if they have put together a package for mandrake at least we could expect that it doesn't have any compatibility issues with mandrake's kernel.

Is that a very pretentious premise? But the thing man is that I'm trying to get it working on RH9.

Anyway it's definitely worth knowing!

Latest approaches
 

Ok I have looked around and it seems that the bttv driver doesn't support all in wonders, which means AIWs are not based on the brooktree 878 chipsets.

I also phisically inspected the card and it didn't say anywhere anything about the bt878 chipset, so for now let's just conclude that in order to watch TV we need something more than the bttv.

I'm trying GATOS once more, since it seems to be the only thing left to try.

I downloaded GATOS's binary drivers for XFree 4.3.0 released on July 2003, because RH9 ships with Xfree 4.3.0 and of course it wouldn't be a good idea to mix those, with drivers that are not for the right version of Xfree. (4.3.0 are only for 4.3.0 & 4.2.0 are only for 4.2.0)

Now, GATOS says in their Conservative Setup that you could install only those binaries and get:

TV playback
MPEG, DVD, AVI acceleration with XvImage capable programs

So l untarred the binaries on /usr/X11 replacing the ones that come with plain Xfree 4.3.0. then startx from the command line

#X>&x.log

And as soon as the image comes in kill x and observe the log.

RADEON(0): dri RADEONDRI ScreenInit failed because of a version mismatch
[dri] radeon.o kernel module version is 1.7.0 but version 1.100.0 or newer is needed
[dri] Disabling DRI.


That means that the ati binaries have a compatibility issue with the built in drm radeon.o module

4.3.0 ati binaries must only be used with GATOS drm-kernel if you want to have DRI, because indeed the drm-kernel provided by GATOS is version 1.100.0

But DRI doesn't have anything to do with watching TV right?, and as stated before they say we only need ati binaries, so let's leave that aside for now and try to get TV in capabilities first.

For that we proceed with the installation of avview (program provided by GATOS to watch TV) because I read somewhere that xawtv won't work with GATOS drivers.

We will require libzvbi 0.2.3 or later (Raw VBI, Teletext and Close Caption decoding library)

You could chek if you already have it with

#rpm -qa|grep zvbi

RH 9 doesn't ship with it so I had to download and install.

We also need tcl/tk 8.4.x

#rpm -qa|grep tcl
tcl-8.3.0-0.1.rpm
#rpm -qa|grep tk
tk-8.3.0-0.1.rpm

That means we need to upgrade to version 8.4.x or avview will not compile.

What I did was to delete the installed packages

#rpm -e tcl-8.3.0-0.1.rpm
and
#rpm -e tk-8.3.0-0.1.rpm

But now that I think about it, I don't think that was very clever because I had to uninstall the packages that depended on tcl/tk as well.

I guess I could have used rpm -u with the downloaded 8.4.3 rpms just to upgrade them. duuh!!

Anyway don't even bother to do that because for some reason the tcl/tk 8.4.3 rpms do not include the tcl and tk config files (tclConfig.sh & tkConfig.sh) which are needed by avview configure script to setup all info regarding tcl/tk structure.

Output from avview ./configure:

WARNING: Cant find Tcl configuration definitions.
blah blah blah!

What we need is to compile tcl/tk from source because their ./configure script is the one that generates the needed config files.

Ok avview compiled flawlessly.

BUT when we try to start it with:

start_avview

It gives errors when it tries to link tcl

*error while loading shared libraries: libtcl8.4.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Well I got stucked here so that's all there is for now. Another frustrating afternoon.

To be continued...

Re: Latest approaches
 

One thing to try would be to see if libtcl8.4.so is even on the system. Maybe someone forgot to package it in the RPM.
# locate libtcl8.4.so
/usr/lib/libtcl8.4.so

If it is, then make sure that /usr/lib is in the file /etc/ld.so.conf and rerun ldconfig. The linker should be able to find it now.

Does this get you any further?

I've got RH9 and the AIW 9000 working with accelerated 3d graphics but I have yet to find the secret to the tv-tuner piece myself.

From your description I'm surprised the card works at all for you. But I'm sure you dont have accelerated 3d graphics turned on if your using the radeon.o driver.

Heres what you do, get the fglrx drivers from www.ati.com. Select downloads, linux, graphic drivers and download/install the new drivers.

Heed the note about uninstalling the Mesa GL libraries, they'll get in your way if loaded.

rpm install the new fglx....rpm

run the fglx configuration (note: resulting config file may misidentify the PCI Bus ID, fix by hand)

load the agpgart module
>insmod agpgart agp_try_unsupported=1

start up X
>startx

if things are working well you'll see the fglx and agpgart modules if you do a
>lsmod

and to check if hardware acceleration is on, run
>glxgears

without hardware acceleration you'll get 100, 200 frames per second. with acceleration on you'll get 2000+ frames per second.

still hunting down the tv-tuner scope.
later
j.b.

j.b.,

If you ever get your TV tuner working, please post what you did. I've been wrassling with it on-and-off for the past two months.

-ken

All,

I'm basically running into the exact same problem. I don't suppose anyone has figured this out yet?

I get as far as compiling AVview, but for some reason it doesn't think the libtcl8.4.so exists. What's the deal? I know it's in my /usr/local/lib folder, and I made sure all the prefixes were correct...etc, etc, and although the thing compiles successfully, it just won't find the so files.

On top of that, if I compile ffmpeg 4.0.8 or whatever it is, it never seems to accept the source tree. When I run the configure, it tells me that ffmpeg 4.0.8 is required...and I'm left wondering what the heck went wrong.

I'm in agreement with most others in that the setup process for the GATOS project is very convoluted. I've seem some claims that someone got it working for an AIW card in linux, but they didn't provide any useful info.

Later.

AIW TV tuner easy - 3D direct rendering tough with Avview
 

Hello,

I have been trying multiple distros for the last couple of months, and I have conistently been able to make TV and capture work in all the distros (I have tried Mandrake, Fedora Core and and Suse 9 ) , which are all 4.3.x distributions of XFree86, and 2.4 .x kernels of Linux.

However, 3D direct rendering starts failing the moment you install the XFree libraries that are distributed with the ATI tar ball.

Prerequisites are that you should have the X-Windows source also on your machine (or configure for avview fails), and TCL/TK 8.4.x (For Suse, that was already selected at time of first installation, so this comes with Suse out of the box, and you can skip this install - for Red Hat, I had to compile after downloading source, and doing a make install - somehow installing TCl/Tk using rpm never worked, maybe because I did not find redhat rpm's, and used some generic one's I got using google search).

Also, I am assuming that everybody has installed compilers (atleast the gcc, and make) from their distros.

for most of the components I needed, I went to
http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...group_id=12629

If the above is redundant, try "gatos.sourceforge.net " and follow links related to "Avview" , "Our Download area" etc.


I selected

1) ATI-4.3.0-14.i386.tar.gz - "do a tar zxvf ATI..., and simply copy all the *.o
from YOURDIR/lib/modules/dri to /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri
YOURDIR/lib/modules/drivers to /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers
YOURDIR/lib/modues/multimedia to /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/multimedia (you will have to create multimedia directory, as it does not exist)

2) ffmpeg-0.4.6.tar.gz - Untar this, go to the directory (do "./configure", followed by "make", followed by "make install". For me, this step has never ever failed or erred out.

2) avview-0.12.7.tar.gz - untar this. Compile this is the same shell as you did the ffmpeg, as I think some of the env variables set during ffpmpeg configure get used here (not 100 % sure, if that is so, but I have always compiled in the same shell, so mentioning it in case it is a factor).
I have run into problems here. In case of Redhat, it complains about TCL/TK 8.4.5 needed, and the only way I could get "./configure ......" to work is after I compiled Tcl TK, and did a make install on that, and then added "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib". For suse, I never had issues with the Tcl/Tk version.
Another thing that I needed for both Suse and Fedora was libzvbi. I got the rpm "zvbi-0.2.4-1.i386.rpm" from
http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...group_id=2599.

If this link does not work, try to get it from "zapping.sf.net" cos the link will become redundant eventually.

Install the rpm using "rpm -Uhv zvbi-0.2.4-1.i386.rpm"

Once this was done, I went to the directory that had avview source and ran
"./configure --with-ffmpeg=COMPLETE_PATH_TO_FFMPEG_FROM_STEP2"
After which "make" and "make install"


And then, after restarting X server (If you don't know how to do it, simply shutdown the machine and restart), run "/usr/local/bin/start_avview", and in my case, it has always run (In Suse, root will not be allowed by X server to run it, so log in as someone other than root)

You will need to set some preferences (like Tuner to "ntsc-tuner", and broadcast to "us-cable" etc).
Run the channel scanner, and you should see the channels flashing.

Sound level is set to zero, so press "-->" right arrow key to increase volume.

You may have to mute/unmute various things (either using mixer that came with GNOME or KDE, or if you have "alsamixer") to get the sound working (believe it or not, the first time I got things working, this was the most frustrating aspect of the experience cos I had no idea that a mixer needed to be invoked).

Next, I need to get 3D Direct Rendering working, so if anybody has done this, please post.

Have fun.
Manish Bhangui

BTW, I have a AMD AThlon XP 2000, ECS K7S5A Pro motherboard, ATI All in wonder 7500 64 MB DDR, and I have made it work for a friend with an AIW 9000 128 MB (not sure about other hardware).
Manish

Direct rendering is also working. All I had to do is get the drm-kernel source from gatos.sf.net, and compile and copy only the "radeon.o" to the /lib/modules/2.4.22***/kernel/drivers/char/drm/

I was getting this error - "radeon.o kernel module version is 1.7.0 but version 1.100.0 or newer is needed" - as per /var/log/XFree86.0.log. This error was switching off direct rendering, and using renderer "Mesa GL Indirect something... " instead of "Mesa DRI Radeon 20020611 AGP 1x x86/MM..."

Only thing is AGP 1x is used, instead of 4x, don't know if I am going to chase resolving that. My main interest at this point was capturing video and I am a happy camper right now.

Manish

well... i am using suse8.2 and the zvbi problem came before the tcl issue.

searching for zvbi-devel in YAST2 solved it.

after zvbi is solved, i get this;
checking for Tcl configuration... configure: WARNING: Can't find Tcl configuration definitions

i open YAST2, searched for tcl and found that tcl n tk are installed but i am wondering if installing tcl-devel helps instead of compiling from source because the version in suse is 8.4.2-16...:confused:
http://www.geocities.com/seow_s/tcl.jpg

tcl-devel (or tcl tk source) will solve it. Install it. For compiling, if you need the source code - not just libraries (look at config log file to see what it is trying to grab) , then getting tcl and tk devel will do the trick.

Otherwise, it may be a case of not having right Paths set, and I have noticed that deinstalling and reinstalling the package from Yast sometimes fixes it (don't know why, but Yast obviously has some issues).

Let us know how it goes.

Manish

yup, installing tcl-devel in YAST2 did it.

which brings me to the next problem.

the end of ./configure gives me

...
ALSA SUPPORT NO
...

but i see i had ALSA installed in YAST2.:confused:

guess i need to do some reading on ALSA.

sometimes i just wish linux isnt so time consuming.